Today I sat thinking about the differences between a public bathroom in the U.S. and in Brazil. U.S. bathrooms usually have good, quality soap and often electric faucets. Brazilian bathrooms usually have cheap, watered-down soap, and often a bathroom attendant that stays inside the bathroom to make sure the faucets aren’t left on and that the bathroom is clean. How can they afford to pay an attendant but still have cheap soap?
This economics question is answered by the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem:
A capital-abundant country will specialize in capital-intensive goods, while the labor-abundant country will specialize in labor-intensive goods.